A literary blog for Orange County, California
and the border regions of Los Angeles, San Diego and Riverside.
Cited as "Best Literary Blog" by Orange Coast magazine: "a one-stop shop for book-minded cyber-crawlers."

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The Morning Reading:"every open law book/was a pair of hands"

A poem by Martin Espada:

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

At sixteen, I worked after high school hoursat a printing plantthat manufactured legal pads:Yellow paperstacked seven feet highand leaningas I slipped cardboardbetween the pages,then brushed red glueup and down the stack.No gloves: fingertips requiredfor the perfection of paper,smoothing the exact rectangle.Sluggish by 9 PM, the handswould slide along suddenly sharp paper,and gather slits thinner than the crevicesof the skin, hidden.The glue would sting,hands oozingtill both palms burnedat the punch clock.

Ten years later, in law school,I knew that every legal padwas glued with the sting of hidden cuts,that every open law bookwas a pair of handsupturned and burning.

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About Rebel Girl

Rebel Girl takes her nom-de-plume from Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, labor activist and subject of the Woody Guthrie song, "Rebel Girl." In real life, she is Lisa Alvarez, a mild-mannered professor of English at Irvine Valley College and co-director of the summer writers workshops at the Community of Writers. Her stories and essays have appeared most recently in the "American Book Review," Green Mountains Review," "Santa Monica Review" and in the anthology "Sudden Fiction Latino: Short-Short Stories from the United States and Latin America" (Norton). She teaches creative writing at Irvine Valley College. You can contact her via ldalvarez@juno.com